Blog Review: April 2

Mentor’s Nazita Saye compares roadway roundabouts to networked systems. One roundabout works fine, but add in a bunch of them and you have a massive traffic jam. How many roundabouts are in your design?

Speaking of standards, Synopsys’ Richard Solomon is expecting a spec. This one is the draft for PCIe 4.0—but only version 0.3 of that spec. There’s even a disintegration gun available if things get really ugly. So that’s how they settle differences in standards meetings.

Rambus’ Ben Jun sounds the alarm bell for security when it comes to the Internet of Things. It’s a lot harder to change a cryptographic key for a thing than a person’s password—and most people never change their passwords.

Advantest CEO Haruo Matsuno gave a speech to new hires, advising them to double check their numbers—a useful skill for anyone working at a measurement company. Make sure you check out the story he uses to emphasize that point. It’s a classic—literally.

ARM’s Andrew Wafaa takes a deep dive into the Xen project—virtualization that is beginning to show up in markets such as automotive and mobile. Xen is the Linux/BSD incarnation of this technology.

Applied Materials’ Ofer Adan says that CD-SEM technology—that stands for critical dimension scanning electron microscope—can extend beyond 10nm. In the metrology world, this is big news. For the rest of the design market, consider this a near miss.

Mentor’s Kamran Shah spills the beans on Mentor’s collaboration with AMD Embedded for open-source embedded Linux on multi-core processors. This seems to be a trend. First ARM’s Linaro, now AMD.

Cadence’s Brian Fuller highlights an interesting new technology—a 3D visualization system that looks like some 3D games. If you see aliens in this one, you’re probably in the wrong room.

On the other hand, Jill Tarter takes aliens very seriously. She’s the head of the SETI institute, as in “the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.” Synopsys’ Karen Bartleson conducts this video interview about the search for patterns and aberrations.

Mentor’s John Day says points to the move by Continental (the carmaker, not the airline) to incorporate a high-speed telematics module. This is one area where dropped signals can be disastrous.

ARM’s Soshun Arai takes a different angle on that need for speed in automotive communication, looking at compute scalability for automotive infotainment and connected cars. Lightning fast communications and compute power are critical in this sector—something that should open the doors for lots of EEs in the automotive world.

Cadence’s Jacek Duda digs into USB controllers, as well as specs for USB 2.0 and 3.x, in this five-minute video from Whiteboard Wednesdays.

Mentor’s Mike Jensen compares risks in designing the America’s Cup sailing vessel to other engineering areas—and what can be done to mitigate those risks. This blog is being scrutinized all over New Zealand.

It looks as if Synopsys’ Mick Posner is designing a tank using FPGAs. So this is why all those men in dark suits and sunglasses were hanging around at SNUG.